Chapter XLVIII: Part XVII: Shakespeare and the Drama

I

An article by Ernest Howard Crosby[135] on Shakespeare’s attitude towards the people has suggested to me the idea of expressing the opinion I formed long ago about Shakespeare’s works, an opinion quite contrary to that established throughout the European world. Recalling the struggle with doubts, the pretences, and the efforts to attune myself to Shakespeare, that I went through owing to my complete disagreement with the general adulation, and supposing that many people have experienced and are experiencing the same perplexity, I think it may be of some use definitely and frankly to express this disagreement of mine with the opinion held by the majority, especially as the conclusions I came to on examining the causes of my disagreement are, it seems to me, not devoid of interest and significance.

My disagreement with the established opinion about Shakespeare is not the result of a casual mood or of a lighthearted attitude towards the subject, but it is the result of repeated and strenuous efforts, extending over many years, to harmonise my views with the opinions about Shakespeare accepted throughout the whole educated Christian world.

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I had expected to receive a great esthetic pleasure, but on reading, one after another, the works regarded as his best, _King Lear_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Hamlet_, and _Macbeth_, not only did I not experience pleasure but I felt an insuperable repulsion and tedium, and a doubt whether I lacked sense, since I considered works insignificant and simply bad, which are regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole educated world; or whether the importance that educated world attributed to Shakespeare’s works lacks sense. My perplexity was increased by the fact that I have always keenly felt the beauties of poetry in all its forms: why then did Shakespeare’s works, recognised by the whole world as works of artistic genius, not only fail to please me, but even seem detestable? I long distrusted my judgment, and to check my conclusions, during fifty years I repeatedly set to work to read Shakespeare in all possible forms--in Russian, in English, and in German in Schlegel’s translation, as I was advised to. I read the tragedies, comedies, and historical plays, several times over, and I invariably experienced the same feelings--repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. Now, before writing this article, as an old man of 75,[136] wishing once more to check my conclusions, I have again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, the _Henrys_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _The Tempest_, and _Cymbeline_, etc., and have experienced the same feeling still more strongly, no longer with perplexity but with a firm indubitable conviction that the undisputed fame Shakespeare enjoys as a great genius, which makes writers of our time imitate him and readers and spectators, distorting their esthetic and ethical sense, seek non-existent qualities in him, is a great evil--as every falsehood is.

Although I know that the majority of people have such faith in Shakespeare’s greatness that on reading this opinion of mine they will not even admit the possibility of its being correct, and will not pay any attention to it, I shall nevertheless try as best I can to show why I think Shakespeare cannot be admitted to be either a great writer of genius, or even an average one.

For this purpose I will take one of the most admired of Shakespeare’s dramas--_King Lear_, in enthusiastic praise of which most of the critics agree.

“The tragedy of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare,” says Dr. Johnson. “There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed, which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity.”

“We wish that we could pass this play over and say nothing about it,” says Hazlitt. “All that we can say must fall far short of the subject, or even of what we ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to give a description of the play itself or of its effects upon the mind is mere impertinence; yet we must say something. It is then the best of Shakespeare’s plays, for it is the one in which he was most in earnest.”

“If the originality of invention did not so much stamp almost every play of Shakespeare,” says Hallam, “that to name one as the most original seems a disparagement to others, we might say that this great prerogative of genius was exercised above all in Lear. It diverges more from the model of regular tragedy than _Macbeth_ or _Othello_, or even more than _Hamlet_, but the fable is better constructed than in the last of these and it displays full as much of the almost superhuman inspiration of the poet as the other two.”

“King Lear may be recognised as the perfect model of the dramatic art of the whole world,” says Shelley.

“I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare’s Arthur”; says Swinburne. “There are one or two figures in the world of his work of which there are no words that would be fit or good to say. Another of these is Cordelia. The place they have in our lives and thoughts is not one for talk. The niche set apart for them to inhabit in our secret hearts is not penetrable by the lights and noises of common day. There are chapels in the cathedral of man’s highest art, as in that of his inmost life, not made to be set open to the eyes and feet of the world. Love and Death and Memory keep charge for us in silence of some beloved names. It is the crowning glory of genius, the final miracle and transcendent gift of poetry that it can add to the number of these and engrave on the very heart of our remembrance fresh names and memories of its own creation.”

“Lear, c’est l’occasion de Cordelia,” says Victor Hugo. “La maternité de la fille sur le père; sujet profonde; la maternité vénérable entre toutes, si admirablement traduite par la légend de cette romaine, nourrice, au fond d’un cachot, de son père veillard. La jeune mammelle près de la barbe blanche, il n’est point de spectacle plus sacré. Cette mammelle filiale c’est Cordelia.

“Une fois cette figure rêvée et trouvée Shakespeare a créé son drame.... Shakespeare, portant Cordelia dans sa pensée, a créé cette tragédie comme un dieu, qui ayant une aurore à placer, ferait tout exprès un monde pour l’y mettre.”[137]

“In _Lear_ Shakespeare’s vision sounded the abyss of horror to its very depths, and his spirit showed neither fear, nor giddiness, nor faintness at the sight,” says Brandes. “On the threshold of this work, a feeling of awe comes over one, as on the threshold of the Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling-frescoes by Michael Angelo, only that the suffering here is far more intense, the wail wilder, the harmonies of beauty more definitely shattered by the discords of despair.”

Such are the judgments of the critics on this drama, and therefore, I think I am justified in choosing it as an example of Shakespeare’s best plays.

I will try as impartially as possible to give the contents of the play, and then show why it is not the height of perfection, as it is said to be by the learned critics, but is something quite different.

II

The tragedy of Lear begins with a scene in which two courtiers, Kent and Gloucester, are talking. Kent, pointing to a young man who is present, asks Gloucester whether that is his son. Gloucester says that he has often blushed to acknowledge the young man as his son, but has now ceased to do so. Kent says: “I cannot conceive you.” Then Gloucester, in the presence of his son, says: “Sir, this young fellow’s mother could; whereupon she grew round-wombed, and had, indeed, sir, a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed....” He goes on to say that he had another son who was legitimate, but “though this knave came somewhat saucily before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged.”

Such is the introduction. Not to speak of the vulgarity of these words of Gloucester, they are also out of place in the mouth of a man whom it is intended to represent as a noble character. It is impossible to agree with the opinion of some critics that these words are put into Gloucester’s mouth to indicate the contempt for illegitimacy from which Edmund suffered. Were that so, it would in the first place have been necessary to make the father express the contempt felt by people in general, and secondly Edmund, in his monologue about the injustice of those who despise him for his birth, should have referred to his father’s words. But this is not done, and therefore these words of Gloucester’s at the very beginning of the piece, were merely for the purpose of informing the public in an amusing way of the fact that Gloucester has a legitimate and an illegitimate son.

After this trumpets are blown, King Lear enters with his daughters and sons-in-law and makes a speech about being aged and wishing to stand aside from affairs and divide his kingdom between his daughters. In order to know how much he should give to each daughter, he announces that to the daughter who tells him she loves him most he will give most. The eldest daughter, Goneril, says that there are no words to express her love, that she loves him “dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty,” and she loves him so much that it “makes her breath poor.” King Lear immediately allots on the map to this daughter her share, with fields, woods, rivers and meadows, and puts the same question to his second daughter. The second daughter, Regan, says that her sister has correctly expressed her own feelings, but insufficiently. She, Regan, loves her father so that everything is abhorrent to her except his love. The king rewards this daughter also, and asks his youngest, favourite daughter, in whom, according to his expression, “the wine of France and milk of Burgundy strive to be interess’d”--that is, who is courted by the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy--asks Cordelia how she loves him. Cordelia, who personifies all the virtues as the two elder sisters personify all the vices, says quite inappropriately, as if on purpose to vex her father, that though she loves and honours him and is grateful to him, yet, if she marries, her love will not all belong to him, but she will love her husband also.

On hearing these words the king is beside himself, and immediately curses his favourite daughter with most terrible and strange maledictions, saying, for instance, that he will love a man who eats his own children as much as he now loves her who was once his daughter.

The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbour’d, pitied, and reliev’d,
As thou, my sometime daughter.

The courtier, Kent, takes Cordelia’s part, and, wishing to bring the king to reason, upbraids him with his injustice and speaks reasonably about the evil of flattery. Lear, without attending to Kent, banishes him under threat of death, and calling to him Cordelia’s two suitors, the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, proposes to each in turn to take Cordelia without a dowry. The Duke of Burgundy says plainly that he will not take Cordelia without a dowry, but the King of France takes her without dowry, and leads her away. After this the elder sisters, there and then conversing with one another, prepare to offend their father who had endowed them. So ends the first scene.

Not to mention the inflated, characterless style in which Lear--like all Shakespeare’s kings--talks, the reader or spectator cannot believe that a king, however old and stupid, could believe the words of the wicked daughters with whom he had lived all their lives, and not trust his favourite daughter, but curse and banish her; therefore the reader or spectator cannot share the feeling of the persons who take part in this unnatural scene.

Scene II begins with Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate son, soliloquising on the injustice of men who concede rights and respect to a legitimate son but deny them to an illegitimate son, and he determines to ruin Edgar and usurp his place. For this purpose he forges a letter to himself, as from Edgar, in which the latter is made to appear to wish to kill his father. Having waited till Gloucester appears, Edmund, as if against his own desire, shows him this letter, and the father immediately believes that his son Edgar, whom he tenderly loves, wishes to kill him. The father goes away, Edgar enters, and Edmund suggests to him that his father for some reason wishes to kill him. Edgar also at once believes him, and flees from his father.

The relations between Gloucester and his two sons and the feelings of these characters, are as unnatural as Lear’s relation to his daughters, if not more so; and therefore it is even more difficult for the spectator to put himself into the mental condition of Gloucester and his sons and to sympathise with them, than it was in regard to Lear and his daughters.

In Scene IV the banished Kent, disguised, so that Lear does not recognise him, presents himself to the king who is now staying with Goneril. Lear asks who he is, to which Kent, one does not know why, replies in a jocular tone quite inappropriate to his position: “A very honest-hearted fellow and as poor as the King.” “If thou be’st as poor for a subject as he’s for a King, thou art poor enough,” replies Lear. “How old art thou?” “Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, nor so old as to dote on her for anything,” to which the King replies that if he likes him not worse after dinner, he will let him remain in his service.

This talk fits in neither with Lear’s position nor with Kent’s relation to him, and is evidently put into their mouths only because the author thought it witty and amusing.

Goneril’s steward appears and is rude to Lear, for which Kent trips him up. The King, who still does not recognise Kent, gives him money for this, and takes him into his service. After this the fool appears, and a talk begins between the fool and the King, quite out of accord with the situation, leading to nothing, prolonged, and intended to be amusing. Thus for instance the fool says, “Give me an egg, and I’ll give thee two crowns.” The King asks what crowns they shall be. “Why, after I have cut the egg i’the middle and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i’the middle, and gavest away both parts, thou borest thine ass on thy back o’er the dirt; thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gavest thy golden one away. If I speak like myself in this, let him be whipped that first finds it so.”

In this manner prolonged conversations go on, producing in the spectator or reader a sense of wearisome discomfort such as one experiences when listening to dull jokes.

This conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Goneril. She demands that her father should diminish his retinue: instead of a hundred courtiers he should be satisfied with fifty. On hearing this proposal Lear is seized with terrible, unnatural rage, and asks:

Does any here know me? This is not Lear!
Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings
Are lethargied. Ha! Waking? ’tis not so,
Who is it that can tell me who I am?

and so forth.

Meanwhile the fool unceasingly interpolates his humourless jokes. Goneril’s husband appears and wishes to appease Lear, but Lear curses Goneril, invoking sterility upon her, or the birth of such a child as would repay with ridicule and contempt her maternal cares, and would thereby show her all the horror and suffering caused by a child’s ingratitude.

These words, which express a genuine feeling, might have been touching had only this been said, but they are lost among long high-flown speeches Lear continually utters quite inappropriately. Now he calls down blasts and fogs on his daughter’s head, now desires that curses should “pierce every sense about thee,” or addressing his own eyes, says that if they weep he will pluck them out and cast them, with the waters that they lose, “to temper clay.”

After this, Lear sends Kent, whom he still does not recognise, to his other daughter, and notwithstanding the despair he has just expressed he talks with the fool and incites him to jests. The jests continue to be mirthless, and besides the unpleasant feeling akin to shame that one feels at unsuccessful witticisms, they are so long-drawn-out as to be wearisome. So for instance the fool asks the King, “Canst thou tell why one’s nose stands i’ the middle of one’s face?” Lear says he does not know.

“Why, to keep one’s eyes of either side one’s nose: that what a man cannot smell out he may spy into.”

“Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?” the fool asks.

“No.”

“Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house.”

“Why?”

“Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case.”

“Be my horses ready?” asks Lear.

“Thy asses are gone about ’em. The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.”

“Because they are not eight?” says Lear.

“Yes, indeed; thou wouldst make a good fool,” says the fool, and so forth.

After this long scene a gentleman comes and announces that the horses are ready. The fool says:

She that’s a maid now and laughs at my departure,
Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter,

and goes off.

Scene I of Act II begins with the villain Edmund persuading his brother, when his father enters, to pretend that they are fighting with their swords. Edgar agrees, though it is quite incomprehensible why he should do so. The father finds them fighting. Edgar runs away and Edmund scratches his own arm to draw blood, and persuades his father that Edgar was using charms to kill his father and had wanted Edmund to help him, but that he had refused to do so and Edgar had then thrown himself upon him and wounded him in the arm. Gloucester believes everything, curses Edgar, and transfers all the rights of his elder and legitimate son to the illegitimate Edmund. The Duke of Cornwall, hearing of this, also rewards Edmund.

In Scene II before Gloucester’s castle, Lear’s new servant Kent, still unrecognised by Lear, begins without any reason to abuse Oswald (Goneril’s steward), calling him “a knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; ... the son and heir of a mongrel bitch,” and so on. Then drawing his sword he demands that Oswald should fight him, saying that he will make of him a “sop o’ the moonshine,” words no commentator has been able to explain, and when he is stopped, he continues to give vent to the strangest abuse, saying, for instance, that he, Oswald, has been made by a tailor, because “a stone-cutter, or a painter, could not have made him so ill, though they had been but two hours at the trade.” He also says that, if he is allowed, he will tread this unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a privy with him.

And in this way Kent, whom nobody recognises,--though both the king and the Duke of Cornwall, as well as Gloucester who is present, should know him well,--continues to brawl, in the character of a new servant of Lear’s, until he is seized and put in the stocks.

Scene III takes place on a heath. Edgar, flying from his father’s pursuit, hides himself in a tree, and he tells the audience what kinds of lunatics there are, beggars who go about naked, thrust pins and wooden pricks into their bodies, and scream with wild voices and enforce charity, and he says that he intends to play the part of such a lunatic in order to escape from the pursuit. Having told the audience this he goes off.

Scene IV is again before Gloucester’s castle. Lear and the fool enter. Lear sees Kent in the stocks and, still not recognising him, is inflamed with anger against those who have dared so to treat his messenger, and he calls for the Duke and Regan. The fool goes on with his queer sayings. Lear with difficulty restrains his anger. The Duke and Regan enter. Lear complains of Goneril, but Regan justifies her sister. Lear curses Goneril and, when Regan tells him he had better go back to her sister, he is indignant and says: “Ask her forgiveness?” and goes on his knees, showing how improper it would be for him abjectly to beg food and clothing as charity from his own daughter, and he curses Goneril with the most terrible curses, and asks who has dared to put his messenger in the stocks. Before Regan can answer Goneril arrives. Lear becomes yet more angry and again curses Goneril, and when he is told that the Duke had ordered the stocks he says nothing, for at this moment Regan tells him that she cannot receive him now and that he had better return with Goneril, and in a month’s time she will herself receive him but not with a hundred but with only fifty followers. Lear again curses Goneril and does not want to go with her, still hoping that Regan will receive him with all his hundred followers, but Regan says she will only accept him with twenty-five, and then Lear decides to go back with Goneril who allows fifty. Then, when Goneril says that even twenty-five are too many, Lear utters a long discourse about the superfluous and sufficient being conditional conceptions, and says that if a man is allowed only as much as is necessary he is no different from a beast. And here Lear, or rather the actor who plays Lear, addresses himself to a finely-dressed woman in the audience, and says that she too does not need her finery, which does not keep her warm. After this he becomes madly angry, says that he will do something terrible to be revenged upon his daughters but will not weep, and so he departs. The noise of a storm that is commencing is heard.

Such is the second Act, full of unnatural occurrences, and still more unnatural speeches not flowing from the speaker’s circumstances, and finishing with the scene between Lear and his daughters which might be powerful if it were not overloaded with speeches most naïvely absurd and unnatural and quite inappropriate moreover, put in Lear’s mouth. Exceedingly touching would be Lear’s vacillations between pride, anger, and hope of concessions from his daughters, were they not spoilt by these verbose absurdities which he utters about being ready to divorce Regan’s dead mother should Regan not be glad to see him, or about evoking “fen-sucked fogs” to infect his daughter, or about the heavens being obliged to protect old men as they themselves are old, and much else.